How To Contour Your Face: A Few Quick Steps to “Have You Lost Weight?”

I’m pretty sure that by now we’ve all seen those contouring how-to images over on Pinterest (like this one, this one with Kim or this one). They look a bit skeletal, and scary. No one wants to look quite that crazy (actually, we all want to look like the girl in the makeover by MaskCara), but how do you translate those brown stripes into something that looks natural?

So, it’s pretty easy. I’ve found that the best way to have this look natural is to use the MAC creams under my foundation (you can see that this was the day I did my Refinery 29 inspired Green Ombre Eye).

The places that should have shadows have contouring (the edges of the face, under your cheek bones, etc) are shaded, and areas that protrude (the middle of the nose, the brow bone, middle of the forehead and chin) are lightened. This is a little more product than I use (about 25% more), but I did that just to show up in the pics. I do a little blending with my fingers, and then apply foundation over this. It then becomes very light and natural appearing.

If this is a bit too intensive for you, this could be easily done with a little matte bronzer (I like Rimmel London for this) and a little highlighter. I’d do a powder product after foundation.

Once everything is all blended out and the rest of my makeup is applied, you can’t even tell! In person my face just looks a bit thinner. I have to be careful about contouring, if I put a little too much under my cheeks, friends at work start telling me to stop losing weight.

Honestly, I did the first pics to look like that on purpose. Haven't you seen those pics on Pinterest? They look like that. They're scary…. and obviously the whole look isn't meant to be natural? It's a dark green ombre smoky eye…

I admit that I was a cheater before and used bronzer too! I just have a hard time not overdoing it sometimes with bronzer, I think with my super pale skin it's an issue sometimes!

And yeah, I was so close not to publishing the anon troll comment, but I try to publish everything that isn't spam, so I let it through. I thought it was obvious that it looks more natural without stripes of dark around my face, but some people are confused, so maybe… maybe it was an honest comment? LOL 😀